Women Executives: Key to Start-up Success?

Jessica Stillman is a freelance writer based in Cyprus with interests in unconventional career paths, generational differences, and the future of work. She has blogged for CBS MoneyWatch, GigaOM, and Brazen Careerist.

If you want your start-up to be successful, you need a great idea, a gargantuan appetite for work, and the money and management know-how to scale. Oh, and having one or more female executives wouldn't hurt your chances either.

That's according to the findings of a new study from Dow Jones, at least. The research crunched a massive amount of data, looking at outcomes from 20,194 venture-capital-backed American companies and the 167,556 executives who led them (11,193 of which were female).

If a start-up went public, consistently operated at a profit, or was sold for more money than it raised, it was deemed successful for the purposes of the research.

So what relationship did the study find behind a fledgling firm having a female founder, board member, or C-level executive and the business coming to a happy ending? In short: Start-ups with women leaders are more likely to be successful. Though only 1.3% of all privately held companies have a female founder, 6.5% have a female CEO, and 20% have one or more female C-level executives, these high-ranking women of the start-up world weren't evenly distributed, according to the report:

The overall median proportion of female executives is 7.1% at successful companies and 3.1% at unsuccessful companies, demonstrating the value that having more females can potentially bring to a management team.

And apparently, if one woman in the C suite is good, more is even better:

We see that a company’s odds for success (versus unsuccess) increase with more female executives at the VP and director levels. For start-ups with five or more females, 61% were successful and only 39% failed.

For VCs, the message is clear--keep more of an eye out for female founders--but there is also obvious wisdom here for entrepreneurs. If you're founding a company and looking for collaborators, paying special attention to involving women may pay hefty dividends.

The report doesn't weigh in on why female executives raise the chance of start-up success. Why do you think women at the top improves a company's chances?